Family Sociology

Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues.

In prospective, long-term research with over 700 couples, Gottman has discovered certain factors that distinguish happy, stable couples from both unstable, ultimately divorcing couples and stable but unhappy couples. These findings, which are explained here in understandable, nontechnical language, form the basis of his Sound Marital House theory of marriage, which guides the new therapy. This therapy has two goals: changing the marital friendship and teaching couples to regulate conflict.

In this extraordinary audiobook, Terrence Real, distinguished therapist and best-selling author, offers women a set of effective tools with which they can create the truly intimate relationships they desire and deserve. He guides you through the process of relationship repair with exercises that you can do alone or with your partner.

A fascinating look at the key components of romantic love - sex, idealization, aggression, self-pity, guilt, and commitment - argues that romance does not diminish in a long-term relationship, describes the barriers to lasting love, and offers helpful advice on how to promote an enduring love by eliminating self-destructive efforts to protect oneself from its risks.

After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong "hill women" who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region - an uplifting and eye-opening memoir for fans of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.

Weaving together over 100 years of history with scenes from the contemporary landscape, Labor of Love offers a fresh feminist perspective on how we came to date the ways we do. This isn't a guide to "getting the guy". There are no ridiculous "rules" to follow. Instead Weigel helps us understand how looking for love shapes who we are and hopefully leads us closer to the happy ending that dating promises.

J. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks, hillbillies or white trash. In this deeply moving memoir, Vance tells the story of his family’s demons and of America’s problem with generational neglect. How his mother struggled against, but never fully escaped, the legacies of abuse, alcoholism, poverty and trauma. How his grandparents, ‘dirt poor and in love’, gave everything for their children to chase the American dream. How Vance beat the odds to graduate from Yale Law School.

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security.

The winner of France's prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating audiobook explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives - the bedroom. Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king's chamber to child's sleeping quarters to lovers' trysting place to monk's cell.

Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than to develop their characters or build healthy habits. What happened to kids' sports?

More than 20 years ago, sociologist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with her best-selling book, The Second Shift. In it, she examined what really happens in dual-career households. Adding together time in paid work, child care, and housework, she found that working mothers put in a month of work a year more than their spouses.

Losing our parents when we ourselves are adults is the natural order of things, a rite of passage into true adulthood. But whether we lose them suddenly or after a prolonged illness, and whether we were close to or estranged from them, this passage proves inevitably more difficult than we thought it would be. The Orphaned Adult guides listeners through the storm of change this passage brings and anchors them with its compassionate and reassuring wisdom.

Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man - or at any rate a man like me - out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.

Taking on this story of heart and hardship, award-winning journalist Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Listeners learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America.

Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments", A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period.

Entre padre e hijos ha permitido que millones de padres alrededor del mundo fortalezcan las relaciones con sus hijos. Escrito por el célebre psicólogo Dr. Haim Ginott, este libro revolucionario brinda consejos y enseñanzas para educar a los hijos de forma cariñosa y disciplinada a la vez.

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world".

Many people find themselves feeling stuck, unable to reach their goals. The same problems keep showing up in jobs and relationships no matter how much they try to make changes and overcome obstacles. What if the patterns that repeat in your life and relationships didn’t originate with you? The source of your challenges could be rooted in ancestral trauma calling out to be healed. An energy practitioner specializing in ancestral and emotional healing, Anuradha Dayal-Gulati provides exercises and tools that can help you recognize and release negative family patterns and enhance positive ones.